Tag Archive: BNP

It’s been a few days since the results of council, Holyrood, Cardiff and Stormont elections, along with the all-important AV referendum, were revealed. The dust is settling, and it’s time to offer my take on the results.

The recent elections, despite appearances, were good for the progressive Left-wing parties in Britain. The Liberal Democrats suffered badly, and the people rejected AV, but the future may still be bright for us Spineless Liberals.

The right-wing, nationalist True Finns party has made sweeping gains in the Finnish Parliamentary elections, going from 4% to 19.4% of the vote. This places the party in third place, and feasibly within reach of coalition seats. This is worrying for the rest of Europe, as they have stated their opposition to the bailout fund, over which Finland would have a veto. Instability ahead? Let’s look at the new parliament make-up.

I need to a proper series of updates soon, but life is rushed – however, this definately caught my eye.

Baroness Warsi has said that AV would let the BNP take power.

Well, for a start.. is that why the BNP themselves are campaigning for a “No” vote? Because they don’t want life to be easier for them? Clearly, Baroness Warsi is badly misinformed, or just distorting the truth.

AV (and I could get into many, many technical arguments, or link to many other blogs), would make it MORE difficult for the BNP to win parliamentary seats. As it is, in some places they only need around 30% of the vote, whereas with AV, they would need to be the first choice of over 50% of the electorate. See how much harder that is?

I also have to make one more point. While, frankly, I find their ideas repugnant but they are a legal political party, and if people vote for them, then they will get seats, under any system. We can’t let keeping the BNP out affect our choice of electoral system. If we really want to beat the fascists, we have to show people…well, how fascist they are, and how bad they are for this country.

So, the Liberal Democrats have suffered yet again following their humiliating 6-th place in Barnsley. This time, a pair of councils – Burnley was lost to Labour, and Labour enlarged their lead in Southwark.

Clearly, this is a sign that the Lib Dems are finished, if they are even beaten by the BNP in Burnley.

So fed up am I of the constant stories of the Lib Dems placing poorly, thus naturally meaning that they’re going to lose out big in the next election, that I nearly did’t bother to look at the article on Liberal Democrat Voice.

But I’m glad I did. The actual figures from Burnley and Southwark paint a different picture.

The Lib Dems lost to the BNP…so, why not to the BNP and Tories? That’s my first question. Secondly, how badly did they do to stay in exactly the same place in Southwark.

Looking at Burnley’s results, we can see that the Tories did almost as poorly as the Liberal Democrats – losing 10.2% versus the LDs’ 11.8% Labour gained the same as the Liberal Democrats, 11.8%, the BNP went up by 5.5% and an Independent got 4.8%. But surely this points, not to the Liberal Democrats failing miserably, but the coalition suffering from being in government. The Liberal Democrat’s traditionally always relied on the protest vote, with that unavailable to them, of course they’ll sink in the polls. But this clearly shows, not that the Liberal Democrats are failing, but that Labour are succeeding. Mostly just by criticising, and saying how they’d have done things different. They haven’t had a chance under Miliband to screw things up disastrously.

This is reinforced in Southwark – Labour gained a huge 13% of the vote, but the Liberal Democrats only lost 2%. The remainder was lost by the Greens (6.9%) and the Conservatives (6.7%). The addition of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition getting 2.3% just goes to show that this is a resurgence of the left, at the expense of the Tories, and more generally the Coalition, rather than the final nail in the coffin of the Liberal Democrat party.

Don’t write us off yet. Clearly, we’re holding on. Now, we have to start climbing.